School Admission Appeals

Refused a place at Menorah High School for Girls?

You are not alone. In 2026/27, 22 families who named Menorah High School for Girls as their first choice did not get a place: the school offered 53 and 75 put it first.

Below: what an appeal in Barnet actually involves, and how contested this school has been over 10 years of official figures.

1.42

first choices for every place available

75 first preferences for 53 places, 2026/27

Appealing a refusal at Menorah High School for Girls

There is no published appeal success rate for Menorah High School for Girls, or for any individual school in England. The Department for Education collects appeal outcomes and publishes them by council. The figures here are for Barnet as a whole and cover every state-funded school in the authority. Anyone quoting you odds for a named school is making them up.

Across Barnet, 15.1% of secondary appeals heard were upheld — 61 of 405 appeals heard in 2024–2026. The England figure is 20.1%.

A panel is not deciding whether you want the school. It decides whether the admission arrangements were lawful and correctly applied, and then whether the harm to your child of not being admitted outweighs the harm to the school of going over its published number. Cases built on preference rather than on those two questions are the ones that fail.

See the full appeal figures for Barnet.

What a panel here can act on

These are national rules, not Barnet ones. Whichever school you are appealing for, the panel works through the same two stages and is required to ignore the same things.

How contested this school has been

Menorah High School for Girls turned first-choice families away in every one of the 10 years published. In each of those years more families named it as their first choice than it had places available.

First preferences per place at Menorah High School for Girls, 2017/18 to 2026/27. A value above 1 means more families named the school first than there were places. 0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 one first preference per place 17/18 19/20 21/22 23/24 25/26 26/27 2017/18 1.81 per place 85 first choices 47 places 2018/19 1.59 per place 86 first choices 54 places 2019/20 1.9 per place 114 first choices 60 places 2020/21 1.42 per place 85 first choices 60 places 2021/22 1.69 per place 98 first choices 58 places 2022/23 1.79 per place 104 first choices 58 places 2023/24 1.26 per place 73 first choices 58 places 2024/25 1.25 per place 71 first choices 57 places 2025/26 1.61 per place 95 first choices 59 places 2026/27 1.42 per place 75 first choices 53 places
First preferences per place at Menorah High School for Girls. Years with too small an intake to carry a ratio are left blank rather than plotted. Latest year: 75 first preferences for 53 places.
View as a table
Places, first preferences and offers at Menorah High School for Girls, by year. A ratio is shown only where the intake is large enough to carry one.
Year Places First choices Offered Per place
2017/18 47 85 47 1.81
2018/19 54 86 54 1.59
2019/20 60 114 60 1.9
2020/21 60 85 60 1.42
2021/22 58 98 58 1.69
2022/23 58 104 58 1.79
2023/24 58 73 58 1.26
2024/25 57 71 57 1.25
2025/26 59 95 59 1.61
2026/27 53 75 53 1.42

Places offered

53

in 2026/27

Named first choice

75

90 named it at any preference

First choices offered a place

70.7%

53 of 75

Offers to families outside the council

2%

1 of 53 offers

Was the school full?

This is the question a panel spends most of its time on. At the second stage of an appeal it weighs the harm to the school of taking an extra child against the harm to your child of being refused — and how much room the school has is the heart of that. The admission authority has to show harm over and above the fact that its published number has been reached, so it is fair to ask what the specific harm is — how the second stage actually works.

Places, Years 7 to 11

518

2024/25, whole school

Pupils in them

302

58.3% of capacity

Unfilled places

216

across Years 7 to 11

Sixth form places

100

excluded from the figures above

Read this before you use these numbers

These are whole-school figures across Years 7 to 11, not the year group you are appealing for. A school can hold spare places in its upper years while the year you want is genuinely full, and the panel will have the year-group numbers in front of it. So this does not show that Menorah High School for Girls has room for your child.

They are also the school's own reported capacity, as at 1 May 2025 — a year behind the application figures further up this page, and a description rather than a finding.

On the published figures Menorah High School for Girls reported 216 unfilled places across Years 7 to 11, at 58.3% of capacity. That is worth asking about — but ask it as a question, not an assertion. A panel will want the figure for the year group in question, and the school may have a good answer about staffing, rooms or timetabling.

Places and pupils on roll, whole school, 2015/16 to 2024/25

Places Pupils on roll

Places and pupils on roll at Menorah High School for Girls from 2015/16 to 2024/25. Where the roll meets the places line, the school is full. 0 400 800 places on roll 15/16 17/18 20/21 22/23 24/25 2015/16 706 places 207 on roll 2016/17 706 places 246 on roll 2017/18 618 places 285 on roll 2018/19 618 places 299 on roll 2020/21 618 places 357 on roll 2021/22 618 places 377 on roll 2022/23 618 places 387 on roll 2023/24 618 places 397 on roll 2024/25 618 places 401 on roll
Whole-school figures including any sixth form, as at 1 May each year. 2019/20 is missing because the 2020 School Capacity survey was cancelled.

Department for Education, School capacity, school-level file, 2024/25. Published under the Open Government Licence.

This school's admission rules have been challenged

Separately from appeals, anyone can object that a school's admission arrangements break the School Admissions Code. The Office of the Schools Adjudicator decides those objections and publishes a determination naming the school. Menorah High School for Girls has been the subject of 2 such determinations. The adjudicator found its arrangements did not comply with the Code in each of them.

Adjudicator determinations naming Menorah High School for Girls. Each links to the full determination on GOV.UK.
Determined Outcome Determination
23 February 2022 Arrangements did not comply ADA3870
30 August 2019 Arrangements did not comply ADA3505

This is not a prediction about your appeal. An objection is about the rules the school admits by; an appeal is your case about your child. No school-level appeal figures are published for any school in England, and a determination does not create any. An upheld objection also requires the school to revise its arrangements, so a finding from an earlier year describes rules that had to change — what matters for your appeal is the arrangements for the year you applied under, and whether they were applied to you correctly.

When a mistake in the process is a ground for appeal →

Office of the Schools Adjudicator, published determinations.

What these figures do not tell you

About the school

Type
Voluntary aided school
Admissions policy
Non-selective
Religious character
Faith
Entry point
Year 7
Council
Barnet

Postcode NW2 7BZ. School details from Get Information About Schools (URN 142627).

Other contested secondary schools in Barnet

Applications and offers: Department for Education, Primary and secondary school applications and offers, school-level file, 2026/27. Appeal figures: Admission appeals in England. Both under the Open Government Licence.